So, I've recently wrapped up development of my Chameleon plugin, which allows skins to grab some key colors from either the desktop it's sitting on, a specific image, or an icon. Here are a few examples:

Installing Chameleon is a bit different from what Rainmeter normally does. Since my intent is to have it be used by a number of skins, I prefer it to be installed directly to the Rainmeter Plugins folder. No point in having 6 copies of the same DLL all running at once! As such, you'll need to pick the correct architecture (x64 if you use 64-bit Rainmeter, x86 if you use 32-bit) and copy it over yourself

This is not needed. 3rd-party plugins will be installed in the C:\Users\UserName\Appdata\Roaming\Rainmeter\Plugins folder and all the skins installed for that user will have access to your plugin. Other users of the computer will have to install the plugin as well (but that is ok, but they would have to also install the skin anyway). 3rd party plugins are only stored in one place, not on a per skin basis.

The C:\Program Files\Rainmeter\Plugins folder is the plugins that come with Rainmeter only.

Please use the .rmskin packager to package your skins and plugins. This really helps with users installing older versions of plugins over newer versions, and also helps us keep malware out of downloads. (We had a really big problem with that a few years ago.)